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Football needs to embrace headgear

THE AGE

There would not be an AFL player who did not take the field without a mouthguard. It is an obvious and sensible precaution against losing teeth during a game. Australian rules football is not for the faint-hearted. It is courage, aggression, skill and contact. This is not chess.

Injuries, as any weekly round-up of the clubs' casualty lists will attest, are part of the game. This week, 150 players are on those lists. Among the listings of ankles, knees and hamstrings are three for concussion. There are no teeth injuries. It is not a facetious observation. The mouthguard works. And if a tooth is broken there are remedies.

Yet the brain is rarely protected. The number of players who wear headgear is negligible. The Age believe we are now at a point where helmets should be considered the norm rather than the oddity. Brain damage can irreversibly and irrevocably change a person's life. Surely, if there were a means to substantially reduce that risk it should be taken. We do not advocate - at least, not yet - that the AFL impose a mandate on the wearing of headgear. But the league is proactive in looking after players, post-concussion, and we believe it would be in the best interests of the players that a more proactive position be adopted pre-injury.

On Monday, a giant of the game, Jonathan Brown, retired. He had received medical advice following another concussion - the third in a year - that the risks of returning to the field were too great. ''The invisible injury is the head injury that nobody can really predict,'' he said. Playing again, with the attendant chance of more such injuries, wasn't a risk he was willing to take.

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Yesterday, the AFL met club doctors to discuss better management of players who had been concussed. It followed an incident last weekend in which Geelong player Allen Christensen was allowed back on the field only a few minutes after receiving a knock to the head.

The AFL, and the other codes of rugby league, soccer and rugby union, have guidelines in managing concussion.

The AFL's football operations manager, Mark Evans, says a consistency of approach is needed in dealing with such injuries. He is right. But while that is being done, the AFL should encourage players to consider headgear. It would lessen neither the spectacle of the game nor the bravado of the players. It would, however, set an example that would trickle down to all levels of the code.

The debate on concussion in Australia has not reached the pitch that it has in America, where the National Football League settled a class action for more than $800 million with 4500 former players who alleged brain injury from their sport. This month, AFL player agent Peter Jess urged that a concussion blood test - developed by Swedish researchers - for players after a match become standard practice. He believed it would remove subjectivity from a diagnosis.

The effects of concussion can be short and long-term, and it is here there is debate on cause and effect. Dr Shane Brun, associate professor of musculoskeletal and sports medicine at James Cook University, is cautious about what is provable in relation to concussion. ''In 40 years' time, an athlete develops dementia. Do we blame the fact he had concussion three times as an athlete, or was he going to get dementia anyway?''

It is a reasonable question. If a measure can be encouraged among officials and players that lessens the need to ask it, who could argue otherwise? Headgear for footballers is such a measure.